Organizational Climate and Social Media Use

Over to the right is a link to a recent version of my survey on social media use and organizational climate. The organizational climate measures are very similar to those that I have used before. That's of course because they have been validated by prior research that I build on.
What's new is the adaptation of the Groundswell social media use questions with some additions of my own. The Groundswell questions are from prior research but their scaling, etc. is proprietary; my scaling and research will be put in the public domain.
A compact valid and reliable measurement tool for social media use is one of biggest needs in this line of study. For example, there are some very good multi-dimensional trust scales that researchers would recognize. Disparate media use measures are a problem. It is hard to compare studies if the measures are different.
Feel free to take the survey and link to it. If you would like a customized version for your firm I would be delighted help by it a win-win proposition; you get the data and reports you need -- I'll do them for you at no cost -- and I get de-identified data. Both the individuals and firms remain anonymous.
Let me know what you think.

IBM Serious about Social Media & Corporate Culture

Luis Suarez had a recent post about meeting with IBM customers concerning corporate culture and social media. That is, uses of the media beyond utilitarian purposes. Of course that's my hypothesis about an ROI for social capital that's an amplifier of productivity.
I thought about some recent flaming email I saw recently -- yes it still goes on, amazingly -- and speculated that the author would have written differently on a wiki related to the project. In addition to the productivity gain of a wiki, greater civility would result.
An indication of how serious IBM is about social media is that they have 500 or so "ambassador" talking about their products.

CSCW '08 & SNCR

Two big social media (broadly construed) events happen this past week. The first was the ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in San Diego. I feel a little guilty for not being there but with dissertation behind schedule and the proceedings available on line, I'll try for next year. I was struck by the large presence of IBM researchers in the largely academic crowd. That's a good thing and shows how serious IBM is about social media and basic research. It also gives a clue as to the diversity and breadth of their research program. The Social Networking at Work and School session looked particularly relevant to my interests and I look forward to getting beyond the abstracts.
If you don't already have access to the publications of the ACM a good place to go would be your local university library.

With more of a practical focus on social media, the Society for New Communication Research presented its Visionary of the Year award to Charlene Li (present in cardboard) and Josh Bernoff for Groundswell. That book, as Josh noted in his acceptance speech, is of high quality because it is based on research. The social media participation scales they created may become a standard after some validation in academic research. IBM had some wins at SNCR but nothing on the scale of CSCW '08.

Surveys and Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is what we got this week with the election of Barack Obama. To quote one of my favorite articles on the subject, “Transformational leaders exhibit charismatic behaviors, arouse inspirational motivation, provide intellectual stimulation, and treat followers with individualized consideration.” (Dvir et al.2002, 735). That’s a report on a leadership experiment. Today I want to comment on Ryan Williams’ excellent review paper and recommend it.

We can’t expect individualized consideration from the president but we can expect it along with other transformation leadership qualities within our companies. Because I believe the evidence that such leadership makes for a more enjoyable and productive workplace, I was grateful to receive last week Ryan Williams’ (2007) paper “Achieving Leadership Results through Employee Surveys.” Ryan is president of twisurveys Inc. (www.twisurveys.com). The paper is based on his masters thesis on servant leadership, a variant of transformational leadership. It gives an overview of the history of employee surveys, leadership theory and the practicalities of developing valid surveys.

There is little doubt that effective communications with employees improve the organizational climate and that normally improves performance of the firm. Surveys are part of the listening that transformational leaders must do. Communication assessments, including surveys, are themselves a form of communication that change whatever is being measured. This truth of social science is one to be understood and exploited. The essence of Ryan’s paper is that regular employee surveys are one of several assessment tools that measure whether leaders are perceived as transformational, etc. The questions on the survey say to employees, “This is what we are concerned about.”

Of course as Ryan points out, management must act, must change, when the surveys bring back data that is actionable. That may be a challenge for managers or transactional leaders.

The implications of transformational leadership are profound because the beneficial consequences flow to the followers who become motivated to take initiative, smart risk, and perform beyond expectations. Both leaders and followers must change and take responsibility. President-elect Obama made the point clearly Tuesday night. I should also note eloquence of Senator McCain’s concession speech that night too in which he transitioned to follower.

Twisurveys’ work puts Ryan in a good position to gather data to evaluate his four hypotheses:

• H1. Transformational leaders listen to followers.
• H2. Survey research enhances organizational unity.
• H3. Organizational survey processes can share transformational leadership attributes
• H4. Organizational surveys can enhance transformational leadership.

The point being that surveys extend the listening reach of transformational leaders in large organizations beyond what is possible face to face.

I originally came across Ryan’s work because of his podcast interview with Shel Holtz. They were confirming the validity of a research theme I have been pursuing since late 2005 from a slightly different perspective: Social media within the firm promote desirable attitudes and behaviors, particularly trust and information sharing.

Social media inside the firewall are low-cost tools as are surveys. We may see social media as “qualitative research” to be used to focus surveys for more systematic “quantitative research.” A blog or wiki may post a theme that should be tested for its true degree of concern within employees across the firm.

Customers, existing or potential, of twisurveys should feel confident about their work as it is based on generally accepted theory and good practices of execution. They can check out the theoretical and the methodological support papers. With Ryan’s permission I post it here.

Dvir, Taly, Dov, Eden, Avolio, Bruce J. and Shamir, Boas. (2002) The impact of transformational leadership on follow development and performance: a field experiment. Academy of Management Journal. 45(4), 735-744.

Williams, Ryan (2007) Achieving Leadership Results through Employee Surveys. Delta, BC, Canada: twisurveys.

Saddened by the passsing of Madelyn Dunham

Life is not always fair. In a matter of hours I will go a few blocks to cast my (optical scan, please) ballot at Central Union Church. I will first look across Beretania St. to where Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, or "Toots" as he called her, lived until only yesterday. It is where a likely president lived with her and his grandfather when he went to high school just up Punahou St. Win or lose regardless of party, everybody was hoping that she would hang on at least until the outcome is known.
I note the gracious comments of Senator John McCain and everybody else observing this unfortunate development. Hopefully she will be buried with her husband at the beautiful Punchbowl, the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

IBM Announces Center for Social Software

I'm grateful for people pointing me to IBM's September 17th announcement of its Center for Social Software. The research program looks very exciting. Read more here.

Their goals are to

• Explore, innovate and commercialize best practices in social networking.
• Work with forward-thinking businesses to pilot and customize enterprise social networks unique to their industry profile.
• Create jointly funded research collaborations with government, academia, industry and venture capital participation.
• Design the future of IBM's Web 2.0 collaboration portfolio, including social discovery, social search and new scalable architectures for social software including cloud computing.
• Further social software governance: formal policies encouraging or constraining the uses of social networking in organizations.
• Develop the science of social software: Quantifying social networking.
• Explore cultural differences in the use of social software.

They will offer internships and corporate residencies as well. I did not hesitate to subscribe to their feed, and as they invited, "stay tuned."

Sir Tim sees need for web trust rating system

Who do you trust on the web?

Warning sounded on web's future

By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

Some feared firing up the LHC would doom the Earth

The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science, says the creator of the World Wide Web.

Talking to BBC News Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was increasingly worried about the way the web has been used to spread disinformation.

Sir Tim spoke prior to the unveiling of a Foundation he has co-created that aims to make the web truly worldwide.

It will also look at ways to help people decide if sites are trustworthy and reliable sources of information.

Read the article.

Giving up on email -- a nod to Luis Suarez

After some weeks of vacation in Majuro fixing up the house and working part time over the Internet (at 46.2 kbs), I have been playing catch-up in Honolulu. The catch up is both for research and day-job matters.
In the latter I continue to remind people that if there is something important, phone me rather than email. By default, I have given up on much email with 2,900+ unread. Many more have been read. The ones that do get read are from collaborators who probably could be persuaded to use a wiki if they had a good one, and of course the ones that involve daily crises. Those really could use a good wiki too because one of the biggest problems is determining the precise details about what has been done and in what order.
Not surprisingly the winners in the Computerworld 100 Best Places to Work in IT (June 30/July 7 issue) tend to feature cultures that foster collaboration. See http://blogs.computerworld.com/tennant
With that note, I head back to the commentators listed to the right. I greatly appreciate the time that they take to share their ideas.

Therapeutic Value of Blogging

Searching on blog* in the Web of Science always turns up lots of articles on blogging in the medical field both for research groups and for support groups. There are blogs and writing about them in other fields of science as well but its pretty clear that blogging has contributed significantly to medical collaboration.
In the June 2008 Scientific American Jessica Wapner wrote about a line of research on the benefits of blogging for cancer patients. These may include feeling better and better sleep. Blogging is a form of expressive writing and more social than bedside journals. The social aspects and forming of communities appear to have therapeutic value.
The source journal articles and the researchers can be tracked down from the SciAm article.

HR Advocacy via Communication

Satish Kumar pointed out in a recent post that HR could and should be the advocate of employees as well as just serve the executives. Beyond processing documents (virtual or real), he recommends expanded roles:
"Fostering effective methods of goal setting, communication and empowerment through responsibility, builds employee ownership of the organization. The HR professional helps establish the organizational culture and climate in which people have the competency, concern and commitment to serve customers well."
It strikes me that social media are excellent low-cost methods to help HR become the "employee advocate" as well as the "change champion." Support of social media sends a message (McLuhan would agree I think) that HR is not just a rule enforcer. Think of a blog / wiki as a continuously running employee survey.

Building Trust

There are several references to trust in Wikipatterns, a book that I enjoyed reading recently and about which I posted some comments this blog. While I believe the claims wikis and trust are true, there is little if any research to support them. The importance is that social media – see my hypothesis – are worth investing in because they improve the organizational climate as well as share knowledge and add to social capital. Improved organizational climate fosters better productivity. There is plenty of evidence to support that claim.

These are the main references to trust that I found:

Geoffrey Corb at Johns Hopkins: “We have found that people involved in our projects are more well informed than ever before. Trust has strengthened between project participants and stakeholders since our operations are more transparent than ever before.”(Mader, 2008, p. 39)

“Wikis shift the social balance away from control and closer to trust.”(p. 49)

“Closed systems implicitly assume that people can’t be trusted and technology has to be relied on to control access to information. This encourages an organizational culture where people don’t trust each other and are concerned with maintaining control over information access. . . .

“Fundamentally open tools such as the wiki encourage just the opposite. Their design assumes that people can be trusted with the information they have access to, and will use it responsibly to further shared goals. This encourages a culture where people do trust each other, and involve others in their work to build the best possible end product in less time and with less unnecessary back and forth effort. . . .”(pp. 50-51)

“A wiki thrives on active participation by as many people as possible, and in turn brings greater value to each individual user. It relied on transparency, trust, and willingness to share information more openly, work more collaboratively, and see information as more valuable when more people have access to it.”(p. 121)

I believe the benefits claimed for wikis and my research needs a few (anonymous) firms where I may add some social media use questions to employee surveys to test my hypothesis on the subject of trust.

Reference

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Gas at $4/gal.: Time for TheBus

No danger yet of not getting a seat starting at about 6:15 a.m. Bused to work putting the bicycle in the rack (on the front of all the buses in Honolulu) and then bicycled home after work
Got an excuse to read some of another neglected book, Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers by Michael Banks. Details soon.

Social Media Guidance Big and Small

Social Media Guidance Big and Small: Two Book Reviews

Two recent good books on social media provide theoretical and practical advice while implementing the open source principle of giving away the ‘source code’ that attracts consulting business, and support sales. We may also see the books and the authors as providing a “bigger picture” and a “smaller picture” contrast in approaching social media.

I’ll start in the order in which I bought the books and read them on some recent long airplane trips. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies provides advice on selecting social media based on survey data that is used to construct “social technographics® profiles” of target demographics. The authors are analysts with Forrester Research, Inc. copyright holder for this Harvard Business Press book. Thus we have the benefit of both data and consulting experience, i.e. case studies, across many firms. The groundswell is defined as “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than traditional institutions like corporations.”(p. 9) Mentioning blogs, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay, Craigslist, MSN Messenger, and more, the central advice to companies is that they better get on board soon in a smart way – even jump on the moving train -- with the new way of communicating with customers and employees. Or lose them! This is the book about the bigger picture of social, collaborative media in business.

Groundswell is organized in three parts: Understanding the groundswell, Tapping the groundswell, and the groundswell transforms. Understanding provides the motivation paying attention to social media, calls for new approaches, and introduces the social technographics profile. More on that later.

Tapping’s first chapter is on strategic planning: POST – people, objectives, strategy, and technology. After planning, the company strategy would include elements – each a chapter -- of listening to (e.g. monitoring your brand on the ‘Net), talking with, energizing, helping the groundswell support itself, and finally, embracing the groundswell. Note that those are social phenomena, not technological ones. Each chapter is well-illustrated with case studies, practical advice on approaches and resources, and applications of social technographics. The goals is to learn about the firm’s audience and get prepared to use social media most appropriately. (I propose that we create non-proprietary acronym for a social use of media profile (SUMP) in place of social technographics. Alternatively, the more intuitive SMUP for social media use profile has some drawbacks because it is used in neurology and has some questionable associations on the Web.)

Transforms features chapters about outward-facing transformation, inward-facing transformation, and finally the future with some concluding advice. The outward-facing transformation is about becoming more customer-centric and using customer input to the advantage of the firm. The inward-facing transformation is about empowering employees, benefiting from their experience and knowledge, changing the culture, trusting employees and engaging workers at all levels. To paraphrase some of their key advice on getting started, “find and encourage the rebels” with small efforts that may fail fast but also fail inexpensively.

That said, the book is not about thinking small; numerous ROI estimates show that if the small initial experiments and risk-taking work out, hundreds of thousands of dollars may be required but with excellent returns.

The technographics or SUMP analytic approach is a definite contribution to social media measurement because appropriate, parsimonious measurement of social media usage is still a challenge to business and social science. Whether involving customers and/or employees, the authors’ technographics classify the target group as being creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactives relative to some target demographic’s use of social media. Critics, for example, would have in the past 30 days done one or more of the following: Posted ratings or reviews of products or services, commented on someone else’s blog, contributed to online forums, and/or contributed to or edited articles in a wiki. As they describe it, “ . . . it’s similar to demographics and psychographics but focuses on technology behaviors.”(p. 41). People may fall into more than category. As an organization you then select a particular type(s) of social media appropriate to the group. For example, 25% (index = 100) of the U.S. respondents of all ages and genders in the Forrester database are critics. For females 18-24, 38% are critics, a relative index of 149 so you might try to engage them by inviting evaluations or to comment on a product blog.

For age group, country and gender, dynamically-created profiles are available on their website (Forrester Research, 2008). That’s a useful tool. (If you want more details or your own survey, talk to the sales department.) Three of the many case studies, for examples, compare Fujitsu (more active on social media) and NEC PC owners in Japan, Republicans and Democrats (a little above average in all categories but inactive), and Toys “R” Us (generally higher on all social media) and L. L. Bean shoppers. In a similar vein, the book’s literature references are linked through the Forrester website http://groundswell.forrester.com where of course comments are encouraged.

In summary, there is plenty of useful advice such as start small, educate your executives, get the right people, technology and plans, etc. But of course the essential elements are human relationships that happen to be facilitated by technology. So their concluding advice is how to be: Focused on person-to-person activity, a good listener, patient, opportunistic, flexible, collaborative, and humble.

In contrast to Groundswell, Wikipatterns is a smaller, more practical book by Stewart Mader (2008) primarily about adoption of one Web 2.0 technology, the wiki. The subtitle is “a practical guide to improving productivity and collaboration in your organization.” A website of the same name (wikipatterns.com) continues the discussion of and addition to the book’s content. Mader is a Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, a company that licenses or hosts its wiki software. Mader has practiced what he preached as he set up a wiki to write Wikipatterns as well as edit a prior book, Using Wiki in Education (2006), that is only available online for purchase in paper or PDF.

In my reading of the book, there are two main themes: The benefits of adoption and the patterns of adoption, growth and maintenance. The book, based on Mader’s experience and case studies, points out key benefits including shared knowledge and information on a wiki, facilitation of collaboration, reduction in email – particularly of multiple often differing copies of documents, encouragement of participation, and efficiency and speed in creating and editing documents.

Patterns of adoption are the key theoretical and practical contributions distilled from the case studies. The key word in the title is patterns. There are four large classes of patterns: People patterns, people anti-patterns, adoption patterns and adoption anti-patterns. Here are just a few examples:

People Patterns	People Anti-Patterns	Adoption Patterns	Adoption Anti-Patterns
90-9-1 Theory Champion Welcoming Wiki Charter . . . and more	Bully Do it all OverOrganizer Vandal	Agenda Overview pages New Starter SingleProblem	All wiki all the time Empty pages PageOwnership Training

Of course not all patterns are of equal significance. My list, particularly to get started would highlight Champion, Sponsor, Wiki Charter, Single Problem, Fly under the radar, New Starter, Clean Permissions, and the like. Mader is in full agreement with Li & Bernoff about the importance of pilot projects – they usually take about six months -- and clear goals and policies. He is much less optimistic that an ROI for a wiki can be calculated. (There are plenty of other people knowledgeable on social media who also are willing to calculate ROI’s for email reduction. See the websites of Jon Mell, or Luis Suarez for examples. Jon Mell points out that for a pilot the ROI for email reduction may be enough but for a big effort, more dramatic evidence such as innovative ideas emerging may be required to justify the wiki.)

Other important discussions include the differences between your upstart corporate wiki and Wikipedia and the importance of people in managing knowledge and feeling in control. Ward Cunningham, creator of the first wiki in 1995, wrote the Foreword noting among other ideas, “It’s natural, after all, for people to collaborate. The wiki will serve as your community’s short-term memory.”

I recommend both books for people implementing or studying social media. Li & Bernoff cover more types of media and applications with more data – they are more “quantitative.” Mader is more “qualitative” getting into some detail about the sociology and organizational experiences of wiki adoption.

References

Forrester Research, I. (2008). Profile tool. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2008). Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Boston MA: Harvard Business Press.

Mader, S. (2006). Using Wiki in Education. from http://www.lulu.com/content/2175253.

Mader, S. (2008). Wikipatterns. Indianapolis IN: Wiley.

Mell, J. (2008). Wiki ROI. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://jonmell.co.uk/2008/03/wiki-roi-final-thoughts.html

Suarez, L. (2008). Email reduction. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.elsua.net/

wikipatterns.com. Wikipatterns. Retrieved June 8, 2008, from http://www.wikipatterns.com

groundswell arrived

Got my copy in the mail today. I look forward to reading Charline Li and Josh Bernoff's book based on research at Forrester.

Research update -- signs of significance

There has been lots going on personally here with the granddaughter's first birthday and visitors in town. Dissertation work continues and it is a pleasure to work with data even if the results are not as clear as one would like. I'm sure that there are other stat packages comparable to SPSS but I continue to be impressed by the ability to concentrate on the data and not the mechanics of running computations.
Here's the latest:
In the current pilot study phase with senior college students and a few MBA students, the scales for trust in fellow employees, trust in management, knowledge exchange & combination, and job satisfaction have satisfactory reliability.
There is a positive correlation between time spent posting to social media away from work and trust in fellow employees. Otherwise nothing reaches statistical significance.
Lesson learned so far in the pilot: My "social media use index" needs some work so I'm revising and shortening the questionnnaire.
Comments are always welcome.

Trust in our government?

It's hard to trust our government when it shies away from strong action in Darfur. Will we just standby and watch again? See the column by Mark Helprin in the NY Times entitled, "Make Sudan an Offer It Can’t Refuse."

Uses of Blogs reviewed

Several of us had the opportunity to review the book Uses of Blogs for the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies.

Editor: Axel Bruns, Joanne Jacobs
Publisher: New York: Peter Lang, 2006
Review Published: February 2008

Read those reviews at

http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?BookID=366&AuthorID=135

It's a good overview of the many faces of blogging.

The Transactive Memory Systems Approach to Social Capital

This is another in my occasional mentions of interesting literature related to social media and social capital. Kanawattanachai and Yoo publishing in the Dec. 2007 MISQ introduced me to the transactive memory systems (TMS) concept in virtual teams. Virtual teams of course are increasingly important in the modern global network organizations. (Note Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL for close to a billion dollars. That’s a powerful 400-person virtual team! Sun itself is no slacker at being a virtual organization.)

TMS has three coordination mechanisms: Recognizing, trusting, and coordinating specialized knowledge in teams. It is a means of analyzing the processes of knowledge sharing. The TMS variables are seemingly ways to mobilize social capital

Their longitudinal study found that early on in the life of the team, frequency and volume of task-oriented communication were important to building cognition-based trust and forming knowledge of expertise location. Toward the end of the team projects, just knowledge coordination communication was the only significant TMS variable related to performance.

The paper’s findings support the proposition that companies would be wise to invest the modest sums to support social media use. Build the networks before you need them.

Time for Employee Surveys to Go Open Source

Readers of BusinessWeek magazine know that Jack and Suzy Welch write an interesting management column on the last page. The January 28, 2008 column contrasts the value of good employee surveys with the polls of this political system. They cite four key questions for employee polls or surveys:
1. Are employees buying into the company mission?
2. Do managers walk the talk about company values?
3. Is the company performing as claimed in public statements?
4. Are the HR systems rewarding excellence and culling under-
performance?
My hypothesis is that social media use in and outside the business promotes the values that contribute to performance. These include trust and knowledge sharing, for examples.
The Welch's probably would less happy with the organizational climate variables in my study but I would claim that the proven ones are as well linked to firm performance as the Welchs'.
One of the big challenges for researchers like me with employee surveys is that they are most often done by contractors claiming proprietary questions and techniques. I'll bet that the proprietary questions are build on the open literature. Academic studies are necessarily open and subject to challenge. I could potentially piggyback on employee surveys and get de-identified data but it could not pass review.
In Hawaii for example, SHRM is running a state-funded employee survey in 40 firms but not even the companies get their de-identified, i.e. anonymous, raw data. In a perfect world I could have an optional few questions on social media use after the 'required' part.
So I continue to look for businesses that would like an employee survey with most questions built on the published literature. I should ask the Welch's too!

It's Conference Season in Hawaii

Last week it was the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS41) on the Big Island and this week it's the Pacific Telecommunications Conference (PTC '08 -- or alternatively, PTC30) in Honolulu.

HICSS now has several mini-tracks related to social media within the Collaboration and Digital Media & Communication tracks. The typical hard choices between sessions had to be made. As usual the opportunity to keep in touch with the people and their work was wonderful. HICSS is most academic researchers but big companies like Microsoft and IBM also present papers by a few of their researchers. Nobody presented a paper that would make my dissertation obsolete so one outcome was a reminder to me to speed up!

PTC is the reverse -- more from industry and fewer academics. The researcher group is expanding and completely filled the researcher lunch meeting room yesterday. Telecom policy papers, whether from regulators or academics, have been particularly strong at PTC. There are several good papers today and an important session on organizing research on ICTs and development. I get to pursue both the day-job interest in internet aboard aircraft with vendors in town, and research interests.

The New de Young Museum

If you get to San Francisco, get to the de Young. It was our first visit since one about a year before the closing of the old one. The exhibits concentrate more on quality than quantity. We had lunch and topped it off with a visit the tower with its great panoramic view of The City.
We look forward to the completion of the Cal Academy too.